CHAPTER 2 •••
FRED AND MINDA
F
rederick August Larsen, Jr., was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1915, to a Norwegian father and Irish mother. His spine began turning to steel when he was three years and nine months old, when in one deadly week in December 1918, his father, mother, a sister, and Irish grandmother died at home, victims of the great influenza pandemic that made orphans out of 21,000 children in New York alone. A month later his Irish grandfather, who carved model ships out of wood for a living, also died from the flu.
Children were rarely struck by this flu, but they were severely affected by what they saw; and in his parents’ small house, young Freddie couldn’t be sheltered from pain.
The symptoms of the virus were unimaginable. Delirium was common and pain was intense. Blood ran from eye sockets, eardrums burst, and ribs cracked during violent coughing fits. Air bubbles in lung tissue popped with a sound like Rice Krispies. By the time victims died, they often wanted to.
When the boy looked out the window to escape the suffering in the rooms behind him, he saw horse-drawn wagons with black-clad drivers clopping down empty streets, calling for families in shuttered houses to bring out their dead, to be buried in mass graves dug by steam shovels.
For about a year after his parents, sister, and grandmother died, Freddie lived with his Norwegian grandmother in Brooklyn, along with his sister, Christina, fourteen years of age, and brother, Clarence, only two. Money from the sale of his family’s furniture was used to buy him a steamship ticket to Norway, where he was raised by an uncle and aunt. They lived in a little white house clustered with others like it, exposed to the icy wind on the rocky seaside cliffs of remote Sandessjoen, on the western coast.
His uncle John Tonnessen was a big man with a big heart. As one of Norway’s chief customs inspectors, he knew almost every ship’s master in the Norwegian fleet. His work sometimes took him to sea, and he took Fred along whenever he could. He and the boy became inseparable. But Tonnessen’s big heart failed him when Fred was fourteen. Two dads down, in ten years.
At seventeen, Fred left home for a life of his own at sea. He signed on as a deck boy on the MV
Attila,
a Norwegian tanker sailing for California and China. Six years later he came back to Norway, to attend the Mates and Masters Maritime College in Farsund, on the southern tip of Norway. By now he was a handsome, strapping young man, five feet eleven and 180 pounds, with clear blue eyes and sandy hair, with curls that appeared to be piled on top of his head because he cut the sides so short. He could flash a smile that looked almost feminine, but he didn’t give it up easily. He also had a don’t-mess-with-me glare that made men around him think he could break them like sticks, if he needed to.
He met the love of his life during his first semester at the Mates and Masters College, in 1937. He was looking out to sea when Cupid smacked him between the eyes with a snowball lobbed by a beautiful girl, which is how Minda Heskestad got his attention. She was twenty-one, the ninth of ten children born on a farm over a period of twenty-eight years, and until the day Fred died, he called her “my Norwegian princess.”
He married Minda, graduated, and went back to sea, all in the busy spring and summer of 1939. As they kissed good-bye on the dock in Farsund, Minda was already pregnant. He boarded a steamship bound for Germany, where he traveled across the country by train, getting a scary look at life under Nazi control, and then caught a freighter from Amsterdam to New York.
He had left Minda in Norway only because they agreed it was best for her to have the baby in Farsund, with family and friends around her. They hadn’t been thinking of war, which broke out in September when Germany invaded Poland. And they had never imagined that Norway would be occupied by Nazis.
“The only thing Fred wanted to do was go to sea,” said Minda. “He had to earn some money. He thought he could send for me to come to the U.S. as soon as our child was born.”
Germany invaded Norway by sea on April 9, 1940. That was their first wedding anniversary, and streets full of Nazis weren’t much of a gift for Minda. Larsen was quartermaster on the
City of Norfolk,
a 1918 freighter converted to carry passengers, steaming between New York and Liverpool. He immediately petitioned the ship’s owners, United States Lines, to carry his wife and baby son back from Liverpool, if he could get them there. There was family in New York waiting for them, including his sister and brother, whom he had scarcely seen in the years since influenza had ripped them apart.
Larsen applied to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for immigration visas for Minda and Jan. He received a letter granting Minda’s visa, but it was stamped “Approval was not given your son, Jan F.”
Jan was caught in a Catch-22. The letter stated, “Through your birth in the United States, your child Jan Frederick is apparently a citizen of this country, and, if so, he is entitled to an American passport. Therefore, you should forward to him documentary evidence of birth here, which he may present to the nearest American consul abroad.”
That wasn’t so easy, with Larsen at sea so much and the German Gestapo controlling the mail to and from Norway. It took months, and each day that his family was in the hands of the Germans, Larsen grew less patient.
As quartermaster on the
City of Norfolk,
his duties at sea included shifts at the helm as the ship crossed the North Atlantic. When he wasn’t on watch, there was too much time to think about Minda and Jan, and their safety. He came up with a plan.
He thought he could take a fishing boat from Liverpool and motor north through the Irish Sea, then around Scotland and the Orkney Islands to the Scandinavian-speaking Shetland Islands, about two hundred miles off the western coast of Norway, where the North Sea meets the Norwegian Sea. He remembered those rough waters; his uncle John Tonnessen had taken him to Zetland when he was a boy. And he knew the rocky coves around Farsund. He believed he could anchor there under cover of darkness, slip into Farsund in a dinghy, steal away his wife and child, and race back to Zetland in the fishing boat.
He applied for a furlough from U.S. Lines and stayed in Liverpool to plan the escape. But everyone he spoke to told him the scheme was insane; between the vicious sea and the German planes and boats, the chances of survival were nought, they said. He couldn’t do it alone, so he reluctantly steamed back to the United States on the next ship, and returned to the bureaucratic paper trail.
He began writing letters to Washington and traveling there on the train from New York whenever he could, knocking on doors at the Department of State, aggressively using diplomatic channels, trying to get his family out of Norway. He spent much of his small salary on cables, phone calls, and travel expenses. By the time he finally got the passport for Jan, Minda’s immigration visa had expired. He couldn’t reach them by mail and had no idea what was happening to them under the Nazi boot in Farsund. He was left with little but his fears.
When an opportunity arose to work for the Grace Line, whose fleet of modern freighters in New York City made it the best steamship company in the country, he quit the
City of Norfolk.
Larsen had been driven by the desire to command his own ship ever since his first day at sea as a seventeen-year-old, and Grace Line was the place where he could achieve that dream. Hard work and intelligence were rewarded at Grace Line.
Larsen held an officer’s license with the Norwegian Merchant Navy, but that didn’t carry weight in the U.S. Merchant Marine; he still needed to take the exam to get a U.S. license. With eight years of experience at sea—from the engine room of the
Attila
to the helm of the
City of Norfolk—
and two recent years of mariners’ college in Norway, he didn’t need to go to school to prepare for the difficult three-day test, but he enrolled in a private crash course in Connecticut anyhow, because he was always hungry to learn. Grace Line was pleased when he passed the exam easily and it was able to make him an officer.
In early 1941, Larsen sailed as cargo mate on the freighter SS
Nightingale,
which was chartered by Grace Line. It was a busy job with heavy responsibility, including some functions of the chief mate, supervising the loading and off-loading of cargo. The
Nightingale
sailed to Valparaíso, Chile, stopping at every little port on the way back to load strategic metals from South American mines, coffee from Colombian plantations, and fruit, which was good moneymaking cargo, carried home in the
Nightingale
’s refrigerated holds in the ’tween decks.
After three months on that run, he got sweet duty as junior third mate on a spring cruise to the Caribbean with the SS
Santa Rosa,
a 225-passenger ocean liner advertised as being “sexier than Rita Hayworth.” He served two more months as junior third mate on the SS
Siletz,
another chartered cargo ship sailing out of New York.
He was making nearly $100 per week, and saving it all because he had no living expenses; and unlike other sailors, he didn’t go out to bars when his ship was in port. He knew he would need cash to get Minda and Jan to the United States, although he still didn’t know how he could. He wasn’t counting on the State Department.
In Norway, German officers had taken over the Heskestad farmhouse, located six miles from Farsund. Minda’s aged father and mother were moved into an upstairs bedroom, while Nazis ate the harvest from Heskestad farm. Minda and Jan, who was about eighteen months old at this time, lived in a small apartment in town.
Their bedroom window was against the sidewalk, which was traveled by goose-stepping soldiers whose barracks were just down the street in a school building. The daytime marching was intimidating, but the nights were downright scary, as the soldiers often staggered home loud and drunk. Minda said it was like having Nazis in her bedroom. She held her son, stroked his cornsilk curls, and told him his father would protect him.
She supported herself by cutting hair in the front room of their apartment. “One time a Nazi officer came right in and took off his cap and his gun belt, and told me to give him a haircut,” she said. “I got so angry. I said, ‘I don’t do men’s hair.’ He insisted, but I refused, and I held the door open for him. He took his cap and his gun and left.”
The other girls there were terrified, but Minda was too firm to be afraid. She was more worried that the Nazis would find the radio her brother kept in the barn, where he listened to the BBC. The penalty for having a radio was death.
Fred wrote dozens of letters to Minda during this time, but she received few of them. The mail to Norway was opened by the Gestapo and read by “little quislings,” said Minda. She clung to her favorite funny memory of their courtship, the time Fred had ridden his bicycle a hundred miles from his aunt’s house along the coast to visit Minda in Farsund one weekend, sleeping overnight in the woods. When he got there, she was out on a ship with her sister until Monday, so he had turned around and ridden back.
But she did get one package from her husband. “There were some clothes for Jan and a pink satin robe for me,” she said. “It was beautiful, and I treasured it for a long, long, long time. It was quilted, and it fit me perfectly. Oh, I was happy. I thought I was a queen.”
Larsen had heard that the Norwegian Resistance was recruiting, and he wanted to join. Other Norwegian mariners had told him about the Lingekompani, a group of commandos led by Kaptein Martin Linge, called “ice cold” and “heroic” by his men. Since his scheme to take a fishing boat from Liverpool to the western coast of Norway wasn’t possible, he now wanted to go to Farsund on a commando mission, and rescue Jan and Minda by sneaking them through the forest across the border to Sweden. The
Siletz
sailed to England, where it was easy for any Norwegian mariner to find the Resistance; but when he volunteered, the Resistance wouldn’t take him because he wasn’t a native Norwegian. The betrayal by Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who had sold out his country to the Nazis, burned in the hearts of Norwegians and kept their suspicion high.
In May 1941, Larsen was assigned to the ship that would take him to war: the shiny new SS
Santa Elisa.
She was launched that month from the shipyards in Kearny, New Jersey, and in July joined other Grace Line ships running military stores to South America, with ports of call in Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Mostly, she brought back copper and other metals from Chile and coffee from Colombia.
In September he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and was commissioned an ensign; it was a requirement by Grace Line that all its officers belong to the USNR, although it didn’t change their status in the merchant marine.
He also finally succeeded in getting the travel documents for Minda and Jan. For $525, he bought them tickets on a Pan American Clipper, scheduled to fly from Lisbon to New York on Minda’s twenty-fifth birthday. But getting from Farsund to Lisbon with a toddler—Jan was nearly three years old now—was the hard part. There were half a dozen legs in which anything could go wrong, with trains and ferries to Berlin, a flight from Berlin to Madrid, and another train to Lisbon. The Gestapo stood at every corner and doorway along the way. And even if Minda and Jan made it to Lisbon, the flight over the ocean in a monstrous “flying boat” was a scary step for a farm girl who had never been away from home and family.
“My friends talked me out of it,” she said. “It was tempting, but I didn’t want to take a chance like that.”
Three months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. Larsen heard the news over the radio on the bridge of the
Santa Elisa,
anchored in the harbor of Valparaíso. After that, his attempts to get his family out of Norway grew in desperation. But the replies from the government weren’t very promising.
Department of State
Washington